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One Foot In

I’m a lot like Sheryl Sandberg, or at least her public persona. Ask anyone who knows me and they’ll tell you I’m a hard-driving, productive, leadership-prone woman who believes it is critically important for women to be confident, unashamed of their talents, and serious about careers they want. I have worked my ass off to achieve the c.v. I have, and I have enjoyed it. But the truth is, I intentionally lean out of my career. A lot.

Recon suggests everybody in East Lansing is now restored to power, as of a couple of hours ago. Today marks 11 days since electrical power went out here--spectacularly in the case of our block, where a down wire arced for 30 minutes of sheer bright terror.

We’re still missing a lot of undoubtedly relevant local history of what exactly happened at University Colorado Boulder with regard to Prof. Patti Adler’s “Deviance in U.S. Society” course. Here’s what we do know, and why this case really worries me.

This comes from personal experience and observations, but also my background in sex research. If you don’t believe in sex and gender differences, or in sex being important in the evolved and cultured human mind, please move along. This will only make you mad.

Lately people have been asking me about the private, pro bono, client-centered histories I sometimes provide for people who have been subject to medical trauma. Providing these histories to individuals -- work that remains almost completely invisible to the outside world -- has been the most consistently satisfying aspect of my professional life. I would love to scale up this work.

On a Friday afternoon, I usually prefer to pour a glass of wine, make a nice casserole, and play Dr. Pangloss, meditating on how I live in the best of all possible worlds. Never mind the large pile of laundry, our unfinished tax returns, and a congested sinus that has me fantasizing about taking a drill to my face. But today, I'm stuck in a meditation on how we seem to be living in the worst of all possible worlds where IRBs are concerned.

Around the time our son was born, our city switched over from conventional garbage trucks to the EZ-Cart system. Under the conventional approach, two sanitation workers would work the truck. One would drive, and one would get out of the truck, lift our cans, and empty the contents into the back of the truck. Under the newer EZ-Cart system, a single sanitation worker stays in her truck’s cab and uses a remote control—sort of a joystick—to direct two large arms out from the side of the truck.